Conclusion:
Perhaps the most important conclusion to arise from the
above comments is that maintenance professionals should
turn their attention away from counting failures (in the
hope that an elegantly constructed scorecard will tell us
how to play the game in the future), towards anticipating
or preventing failures which matter.
So to be truly effective, we simply have to get comfortable with the idea of uncertainty, and deploy strategies
which enable us to deal with it confidently. We also need
to recognise that if the consequences of too much uncertainty cannot be tolerated, then we must change the con-
sequences. In extreme cases of uncertainty, the only way
to do so may be to abandon the process concerned.